As a consequence of the Danish-Norwegian immigrations, the art of ship-building must also have necessarily developed itself in a similar manner in England, on whose eastern and north-western coasts the descendants of the Vikings had everywhere spread themselves, both by the sea and on the rivers. Christianity certainly put an end to the life of the Viking. “Söhaner” (sea-cocks) were no longer to be found, who scorned “to sleep by the corner of the hearth, or under sooty beams.” But the Vikings’ spirit was not therefore dead. The Scandinavian colonists could never entirely degenerate from their fathers, who had joyfully “ridden on the backs of the waves,” and who in the icy sea, and on the Atlantic Ocean, had greeted the storm only as a welcome friend, which assisted the oars and speeded the merry passage. Among the Vikings were many like the Danish chief made prisoner by King Athelstane at the siege of York in 927. The King treated him well, and retained him in his hall more as an equal than a prisoner. But in a few days the chief fled and put out again to sea; for it was, the chronicle adds, just as impossible for him to live on land “as for the fish to live out of the water.” The immediate descendants of such men, for whom a seafaring life was a necessity of their very nature, must have continued to dash through the water, particularly when, as in England, they were settled near seas and rivers. During all the internal dissensions and foreign wars that occupied England in the first centuries after the conquest by William the Norman—and which ended by binding more firmly together the various Celtic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian races which composed its population—the maritime affairs of the English were no longer confined, as in more ancient times, only to commerce with the nearest neighbouring countries. Through the mother countries of Scandinavia, and especially Norway, they continued during the early part of the middle ages to maintain a lively intercourse with the distant Scandinavian republics in Iceland and Greenland. But when, in the thirteenth century, the independence of these republics was overthrown, and they were placed as tributary countries under the Norwegian crown, the free trade that had previously flourished became much more restricted. The consequence of this was, that the navigation to Greenland from the north decreased more and more, until, in the fifteenth century, when the Scandinavian population of Greenland had been annihilated by sickness and by the assaults of the natives, it entirely ceased. What also much contributed to this was, that the trade which the Northmen themselves carried on with Iceland became gradually, and in the fifteenth century was almost entirely, although illegally, transferred to the English, who under the guidance of their Scandinavian kinsmen had found their way thither. Hull and Bristol—which latter place is named as early as the twelfth century